Edith C. Kingsbury

Edith Kingsbury was born in Belmont, Massachusetts on June 24, 1916, the only child of Russell and Mabel Cameron. Her mother was a consummate gardener and her father ran Dickson Bros Hardware in Harvard Sq. She attended the public schools in Belmont before going, first to Wellesley College and later to MIT where, in June 1940, she was one of the first women to graduate with a degree in architecture.

While designing sets for the MIT theatre, she met Edward (Ted) Kingsbury and, in September 1940, they were married. They moved to Keene, New Hampshire. Edith designed and oversaw the building of their first home on Bradford Road.

While Edward served with the US military during WW2, Edith worked as a draftsperson at Kingsbury Machine Tool. Much as she liked it, at war’s end, she returned to the home to have a family of four children and numerous pets.

As a child, Edith suffered with terrible asthma. Under doctor’s orders, she spent many happy vacations on the beach of Scituate, MA. She walked the shore, searching for seashells and wondering about the vast ocean: it’s contents and its beginnings. Her adult life was a continuation of this complex relationship to her own curiosity: she traveled across the United States studying and gathering a myriad of fossils and minerals. She taught evolution for the Sunday School in the Unitarian Church and wrote a book, Rocks that Captured History, (Beacon Press) which was used with fourth grade Sunday school students for a generation.

In 1963 the family moved to Wellesley, MA. She joined Massachusetts Audubon and the local horticultural societies. She continued to write, illustrate, and publish pamphlets, tracking the ancient history of the hills in Wellesley and mapping trails in newly acquired lands.

By the mid 1970s, she began to design and built historically accurate dollhouses. She collected antique glass and visited numerous glass factories and glass blowers in the US and Europe. In the last thirty years of her life, however, she focused her curiosity on collecting buttons, primarily the silver and turquoise buttons of the southwest and the bone and mother of pearl buttons of the Eskimos and Inuits.

But her first, and her greatest love, was the garden. Whether she was working alongside Eloise Watson in the formal garden at 110 Court St. in Keene, NH, responding to invasive species in the development of a garden at the Unitarian Church in Wellesley, MA, designing an 1880’s tea garden for the Wellesley Historical Society, or working as a docent at the Wellesley College Botanical Garden, she was most at home among plants. She knew their history, their soil, their sun, their home environment, and wherever there was a window, a scrap of soil, a bit of shade, a view of the sun, there were always plants.

Edith never stopped learning, gardening, or loving her life. Even in the last years, when macular degeneration took her eyesight, she listened to books on tape, studying such topics as the national parks, the biography of John James Audubon, the complete Rolling Stone interviews of the 1960s, and murder mysteries narrated by cats.

She passed away on April 10, 2013 after a long illness. She leaves her children: Susan and her husband Bernard Levine of State College, PA; Lois MacDonald of Maynard, MA; and Martha Kingsbury and her long time lover, Jane Myers of Cambridge, MA; her four grandchildren, Jim Downar and his wife Heather, of Seattle Washington, Lynda Howe and her husband James of Tampa, Fl., Kathrine Witbeck of Marlborough, MA, Michael Witbeck of San Francisco, CA, and three great grandchildren: Cameron, Kyra, and Fisher Howe.

Services for Mrs. Kingsbury will be held Saturday afternoon at 1 o'clock at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Washington Street, Keene, NH. Friends are invited. There are no public calling hours.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Massachusetts Audubon Society, 208 South Great Road, Lincoln, MA 01773 and Perkins School for the Blind, 175 North Beacon St. Watertown, MA, 01773.

The Fletcher Funeral Home & Cremation Services, 33 Marlboro Street, Keene is in charge of the arrangements.